Yet Another Identity Precaution

It doesn’t seem that long ago when we learned of dumpster divers – people who sift through trash looking for identity information from discarded bills, credit card offers, and other scraps containing your identity information. Leave it to some Nigerians, the current leaders of the fraud industry, to bring the same technique to used hard drives. The BBC reports that bank details on thousands of Britons were sold in West Africa for less than £20 each. How did they get the information? It was left on used PC’s sent for recycling. Some of us know that merely deleting files is insufficient. You can find free programs on the Internet to undelete files. That’s because deleted files aren’t removed from the disk. Instead, deleting a...

Security by Obscurity

A lot of people are afraid of identity theft or fraud. Others are afraid of having their true identity known when they engage in behavior that some may find objectionable, embarrassing, or shameful. For a plethora of reasons, people choose to hide their identity online; either by anonymity or using pseudonymous names. This is security by obscurity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. The entire concept of security by obscurity is that people can’t break through your security if they don’t know where to look, or it’s not worth their time to look for something. That’s a false sense of security because there is always someone with the time, desire, and means to locate something you value – including your identity. I found three...

Auditors Lose Credit Card Data

I just read a news article warning that thousands of Hotels.com customers from 2004 may be subject to identity fraud because their information was on a laptop stolen from an auditor’s car. Ernst & Young is the outside auditor. The laptop contained names, addresses, and credit card numbers for 243,000 customers. The auditor didn’t take the simple security precaution of encrypting the data or his hard drive. Even if you only have one transaction with a vendor, they keep your name, address, and credit card number for years. Is that ethical? What use does a vendor have to keep my credit card information if I don’t authorize another transaction? The sad truth is that you do not own your identity. The attributes that identify you are there for...